An eschatological, non-denominational ministry

Deadliest wildfire in California’s history portends what’s to come. Scientific community is unknowingly using the same terms Christ used when describing the ‘season’ of the times prior to the Tribulation.

… And great earthquakes shall be in diverse places, and famines, and pestilences; and fearful sights and great signs shall there be from heaven. (Luke 21:11).

… And there shall be signs in the sun, and in the moon, and in
the stars; and upon the earth distress of nations,with perplexity; the sea and
the waves roaring; (Luke 21:25)

… Men’s hearts failing them for fear, and for looking after
those things which are coming on the earth: for the powers of heaven shall be
shaken; (Luke 21:26)

… This know also, that in the last days perilous times
shall come. (2 Timothy 3:1)

(Emphasis
Added).

Jesus
is giving a series of prophecies about what to look for as the age of grace
comes to a close. These verses are several of many such prophecies from
throughout the Bible. 2017 was the worst year in recorded history for the
intensity, frequency, severity, duration and occurrence of a large number of
severe natural disasters worldwide. Earthquakes, volcanoes, hurricanes,
typhoons, cyclones, torrential flooding, unprecedented wildfires in unusual
places, devastating droughts, excessive/scorching heat setting records
everywhere, record snowfalls in Europe and Russia. Snow in the Arabia. This
list can go on. Most studied eschatologists believe these ‘fearful sights’ and
massive natural disasters are all part of the ‘CONVERGENCE’ of signs that this
Biblical and prophetic age is closing. Most people who study prophecy are
familiar with the routine reference(s) made that these things will be like
a woman having labor pains that occur in greater severity, frequency,
size and duration prior to giving birth. End of note.

Deadliest wildfire in California’s history portends what’s to come. Scientific community is unknowingly using the same terms Christ used when describing the ‘season’ of the times prior to the Tribulation.

Michael Walsh. Yahoo News. November 14, 2018.

Exhausted
California firefighters are working around the clock to combat the most
destructive wildfires in the state’s history — a designation that likely won’t
hold for long.

The Camp Fire, which incinerated the town of Paradise in
Northern California, has killed at least 48 people and scorched 195 square
miles since it began on Thursday, Nov. 8. It is only 35 percent contained. The
Woolsey Fire, which destroyed parts of Malibu, killed two people and charred
97,000 acres, is 47 percent contained. The Hill Fire, which charred 4,500 acres
in Ventura County, about 60 miles northwest of Los Angeles, is 94 percent
contained.

California’s wildfireshave steadily become larger, more destructive and more frequent. Experts say the devastating trend will continue as a result of many factors, including forest mismanagement and anthropogenic global warming. Jonathan Cox, an assistant chief with San Mateo County Fire Department and the California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection (Cal Fire), said this epidemic didn’t sneak up on us in the last few years. Instead, it’s been 100 years in the making: development,population growth and climate change are all factors, and long-term, systemic social change is needed to confront it.

“There are
6,000 firefighters right now that haven’t slept for 36 hours that would do
anything for a silver bullet to fix this problem,” Cox told Yahoo News. “For
every percent containment you see on these updates, that equates to thousands
and thousands of firefighter hours — literally human blood, sweat, tears — to
get the percent containment.”

Cox said Cal
Fire used to be a seasonal agency but is now staffing more firefighters year-round
in response to climate change and an extraordinarily prolonged fire season.
“Our firefighters right now — both in Northern and Southern California — are
spending 24-hour shifts doing everything they can to either assist in body
recoveries or put in fire line or put in hose lays or get in their dozers and
actually cut the hillside,” he said.

Cox said
it’s mainly a ground attack with assistance from aircraft where possible —
including helicopters and larger tankers — but that Mother Nature’s cooperation
is the biggest factor at this point. The flames have been fanned by 60-mph
winds, which subsided somewhat on Wednesday, allowing fire crews to make some
headway.

“In
California right now, we are seeing a shift from a fire season to a way
of life. It has the most tragic of consequences,” he said. “It’s
stretching everybody from our communities to our firefighters. Ourbig
challenge, I know for my generation, is how we combat this.”

The consequences of climate change are causing and
propelling larger and more destructive wildfires than California’s seen in the
past. Firefighters have historically taken advantage of cooler temperatures and
higher humidity at night, but in recent years they’ve been stymied by
round-the-clock high temperatures. California has faced shifting rain patterns and
varying degrees of a prolonged drought for the last seven years, and it’s
currently going in the wrong direction, leading to drier fields and record-low
moisture for trees, the brush, plants and vegetation. Much of
California’s forested land has become a veritable tinderbox that only requires
an ignition to kickstart these out-of-control fires.

“The scene
we’re seeing with these fires — the Santa Rosa fire last year, the Valley Fire
the year before, the Paradise Fire this year — is we’re seeing fires grow and
expand at rates of spread we’ve never seen before,” Cox said. “We’re
looking at fires burning at miles per hour and looking at communities and
cities destroyed in a matter of hours.” Noah Diffenbaugh, an earth science
professor at Stanford University and the senior fellow at the Stanford Woods
Institute for the Environment, was a lead author for the 2014 report of the
United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. He said in
the last 40 years the area burned in the western United States has increased
tenfold and that global warming has accounted for about half of
that dramatic rise by drying out the vegetation so it becomes tinder, a
phenomenon called fuel aridity. “This isn’t a matter of opinion. This is a
matter of fact. Scientific evidence,” Diffenbaugh told Yahoo News. “What’s
clear is that California is in a new climate.” Though humans are responsible
for a majority of the ignitions in California, he said, these dry conditions
dramatically increase the wildfire risk.

“In our
research, we found that California’s low precipitation years are now twice as
likely to co-occur with warm conditions, and we know that that kind of low
precipitation and high temperature increases drought risk,” Diffenbaugh said.
“It draws moisture out of vegetation and soils, causes more precipitation to
fall as rain rather than snow. The snow that does fall melts earlier in the
year. These are all trends we are seeing in the historical record and all trends
we can expect to see intensify in the future as further global
warming occurs.”

Diffenbaugh
said California has opportunities to catch up with the climate change that has
already happened, become more resilient and prepare for changes to come, but he
added that denying the connection between climate change and wildfire risk is
extremely dangerous. “Simply denying that very clearly observed increase in
wildfire risk or that global warming is playing a role does nothing to help
communities prevent and prepare for these events,” he said. President Trump
downplayed the role of climate change in the current wildfires by blaming
“gross mismanagement of the forests” on Twitter. Trump is wrong to dismiss climate change as a major factor, but he’s correct
that forest mismanagement is also an important issue.

Niel
Lawrence, who used to direct the Natural Resources Defense Council’s forest
advocacy initiatives, said there’s sound scientific support for saying that
climate change is making wildfires worse and will continue to do so, but Lawrence
explained that poor forest management got us into this fix in the first place. “The
background conditions of the forest are the result of a hundred years of
mismanagement of public lands, including the cutting of the largest and most
fire-resistant trees, which has both left behind the more fire-vulnerable trees
and created conditions for a big in-growth of saplings that are really
flammable,” Lawrence told Yahoo News.

He said
small woody materials, like twigs and needles, are the most flammable things
that drive intense fires. But Lawrence also said that by systematically
removing the largest trees over the last 100 years, forest managers at the
state and national level have created much more flammable forests. “The
physical structure is much more flammable because of management mistakes, and
the forest is made drier and more prone to explosive burning by climate
change,” Lawrence said.Tim Brown, the director of the Western Regional Climate
Center for the Desert Research Institute in Reno, Nev., said that climate
change has enabled more intense wildfires but that fire has always been “very
natural” in California.

“A lot of
these communities have built up in areas where it’s very easy to have fire.
That’s why there’s an expectation that these fires will continue well into the
future,” Brown said. He said there are steps homeowners and communities can
take to fireproof houses, but they’re often prohibitively expensive and
wouldn’t correct the widespread fuel aridity.

Unlike Trump, California Gov. Jerry Brown understands the climate crisis and has made reducing green house gas emissions and adapting to the changing environment a major issue for his administration. At a press conference on Sunday, he said regular wildfires are not the “new normal” but the “new abnormal.” “This new abnormal will continue, certainly in the next 10, 15, 20 years. Unfortunately, the best science is telling us that dryness, warmth, drought, all those things, they’re going to intensify,” Brown said.

The vast
majority of major scientific associations have published statements affirming
that comprehensive scientific evidence clearly shows that global climate change
caused by human activities is occurring and poses a significant and growing
danger to society. For instance, the American Meteorological Society said in a 2012 statement: “It is clear from extensive scientific
evidence that the dominant cause of the rapid change in climate of the past
half century is human-induced increases in the amount of atmospheric greenhouse
gases, including carbon dioxide (CO2), chlorofluorocarbons, methane, and
nitrous oxide.”